I woke up around 2am today. Decided to wander outside and what did I see? The first clear night in weeks! Time to practice my night sky photography. Did a series of long exposure shots (30 seconds, ISO 800, f/3.5) but could not get the focus right. This is one of the hardest things for me about shooting the night sky. Auto-focus doesn’t work, you can’t see anything through the viewfinder, and your focus has to be perfectly on infinity. Anyway, after 40 minutes of trying in 32 degree weather I gave up. Looked at my blurry star shots and thought “Hey! What if I merge all of these exposures?” This is the result. I think I like it better than the properly focused night sky shot I was trying to get. I hope you like it – now I’m going back to bed.

Follow up to my earlier post “Supermoon (almost)”. My attempt to capture the full 2011 “supermoon”. Taken with a Nikon D7000, 18-200mm lens, and a tripod. Settings were ISO 100, f/8.0, 1/320 second exposure.

Saturday is the night of the “supermoon” – a full moon when it is closest to earth. Has not happened for 18 years. (Thanks to Sean for the clarification!) I don’t know if we will have clear skies on Saturday so I decided to get a shot of the almost-supermoon tonight. This was done with my Nikon D7000 camera, a tripod, and an 18-200mm zoom lens. Settings were ISO 100, f/5.6, 1/125 second exposure.

We had a break in the clouds this evening and I was able to capture the crescent moon before it set. This shot is a fusion of two exposures processed with Photomatix Pro 4.0 HDR software. The camera is a Nikon D7000 and the settings were ISO 400, f/5.6, 200mm. The two exposures were 1/500 second and 1/200 second.